Post-9/11, around 2003 and 2004, the Iranian transgender community suddenly experienced a spike in Western press media coverage. The nature of such press often focused on the juxtaposition between Iran’s policies on Iranian trans individuals and their rampantly homophobic sodomy laws. Oftentimes the narrative presented on mainstream television is laced with shock in recognizing the Iranian government’s financial support of sex-reassignment surgery for trans individuals, a right given “after years of petitioning and repeated inquiries [from] Iranian trans woman and advocate, Ms. Maryam Khatoon Molkara.” What typically follows this recognition is some form of anti-Islamic rhetoric stemming from the possibility that gay and lesbian Iranians …show more content…
The three texts share several commonalities across them, some of which being their construction of Iranians as overt “others” and their narratives of Islamophobia, whether subtle or overt. Out of the three videos at hand, They provides the most intricate representation of gender, its protagonist never explicitly defining their gender by any means, but there is a catch: the protagonist is white. The Iranian characters in the film (and there are quite a few) are relegated to different positions. While J, the film’s protagonist, is demonstrating their inability to live up to normative constructions of gender throughout the film, the Iranian characters, such as Araz, are present to cast a light on foreign misunderstandings about Western gender and sexuality. Throughout the film, Araz and his family members are consistently shown fumbling over J’s pronouns, their mistakes cloaked in their thick accents and inability to speak English for too long, to the dismay of J and their older sister, Lauren. Even the subtitles, integrated into the film’s visuals due to the bilingualism of the film, attribute pronouns to certain phrases, a mistranslation which emphasizes inherent prejudices within Iranian society. Thus, despite Ghazvinizadeh’s status as an Iranina-American filmmaker, she is still guilty of formulating Iranians and queerness as something incompatible, playing into a narrative which seeks to present the United States as modern in opposition to Iranian